Astraware released a Symbian® S60® smartphone version of their Big Box of Blox, and they’re celebrating. They’re giving it away for free! But not just the Symbian version. No, you can also get the Windows Mobile (or Palm) version for free!

All you need to do is become a Club Astraware member, which is free. You get monthly discounts, and you get points for your purchases with which you can save for even more discounts.

I’m a happy Club Astraware member and today I’ve become an even more happier member, since I just registered and downloaded Big Box of Blox for free.

Club Astraware website is here.
Big Box of Blox website is here.

And the press release is after the break!

A little while ago I read a review on TiltSite.com about the Krusell Touch Screen Pointer, and I was intrigued by the product. It’s a plastic pointer attached to a lanyard. Using the this pointer you’ll no langer have to take the stylus out of your device because the lanyard with the pointer is attached to your device, and always withing reach. I wondered how useful it would be for me, so I did some further investigation. The review didn’t mention the price of the product, and neither did the Krusell website (they just let you locate a store in your country). One of the few stores in my country that had the Touch Screen Pointer (Expansys) sold them for 18 euros (about $28 according to Google Conversion), so I thought: “That’s quite expensive, can’t it be any cheaper?”. Luckily, the TiltSite review mentioned that the Touch Screen Pointer was actually created by Triforce, a Swedish company. And, surprisingly enough, they sell them for just 6,95 Euros! Shipping is 2 Euros, worldwide. So no matter where you live, you’ll pay 8,95 Euros which is only half of what it would cost me to purchase it from the local Expansys store. This proves that it’s good to do some searching when you’re planning a purchase.

Anyway, read on after the break to find what this Touch Screen Pointer is all about (the name should reveal it already though), and if it can help you in your Pocket PC (or any device with a touch-screen) usage.

From my software reviews, you might know that I often do it in chronological order. So first the menu´s and settings of a game, and only then the actual gameplay. The same goes for this review, so if you just want to read about the Touch Screen Pointer feel free to skip the first two sections.

Triforce

Judging from their website, Triforce seems to be a beginning company focussed solely on the Touch Screen Pointer. When I first visited their website a week ago there was less content than there is now and they’ve also added a notification on their homepage that the first 500 people who order a Touch Screen Pointer will get a second one for free. Seems like this review comes at a great time both for Triforce (publicity) and for the customers (second one for free).

The reason for writing this extra paragraph here is that I’ve had a great talk with the folks from Triforce in the last week. When I contacted them for a review sample (they actually sent 4 of them!) I got an e-mail back from two people, and we’ve been chatting a bit in the last week. Camilla Glatzl (the designer of the Touch Screen Pointer) told me about her trip this week and Sven-Olof Larsson (who actually sent me the review units) turned out to be a soccer fan. With the Euro 2008 championships this week, it was an easy topic for discussion. (He knows way more about Dutch soccer players than I do, even though he’s from Sweden and I’m from the Netherlands)

I have had more good contact with companies (IliumSoft, Astraware and SBSH are some that are known for good PR relations) but I was rather surprised with how friendly and personal this communication with Camilla and Sven-Olof was, so I thought it was worth mentioning.

Ordering

Ordering is pretty standard for the most part, but there was one part that had me confused for few seconds. You can just put the item(s) in your shopping cart and proceed to checkout like you’re used to with other online shops. Normally, you’ll then get to a page with several steps in which you have to enter your address, select shipping options, and confirm your order. On the Triforce website these steps are the same, but they’re presented in a vertical way.

Just be sure to create an account and work your way from top to bottom. First enter your billing information and select if you want to use that address for shipping. If you then press Continue, it will go to the next step (depending on if you wanted to use your billing address for shipping as well). Select shipping (there’s currently only one option, worldwide shipping for 2 Euro’s), and press Continue. If the Continue button is not available, click on the “Shipping Information” header, click continue there, and then the Continue button will be available on the Shipping section as well. After confirming your order, you can proceed to process your order. It is important to do everything in the right order!

The Touch Screen Pointer

My e-mail to Triforce was sent on Friday around 5 PM and already 1 hour later I got a reply back saying that they would send out some review samples on Monday because it was a public holiday in Sweden at the time. The Touch Screen Pointers only took two days to arrive, and they came in a white envelope. There was a thank-you letter with a handwritten note, and the four Touch Screen Pointers. So the HTC TyTn II in the image below was not included! You can click on the images to enlarge them, though. 

The Touch Screen Pointer originally was a lanyard with a piece of a postcard cut in a triangle. Camilla Glatzl changed the materials though, and now the piece you hold in your hand is made from very flexible plastic. It’s still attached to a lanyard that is not too long, but long enough so that you can hold the pointer in your hand and comfortably use it on the entire area of the screen. In fact, I found a second use for the lanyard that I possibly use even more than the pointer itself: in areas where there’s a risk of your device being taken or dropping out of your hand (the shopping mall, train station, in the bus, etc.) I put my left had through the lanyard and then take my device in that hand. I can then type my SMS messages with the lanyard around my wrist, serving as a security measure against theft or accidental drops. If someone would try to take my device, or if I drop it, it is still connected to the lanyard around my wrist!

So, how do you attack the lanyard? By default, the Touch Screen Pointer has a little cord at the end. Most devices have a hole (actually two) where you can attach such cords by putting the cord through the hole and then taking the Touch Screen Pointer through the loop in the cord. (You can optionally have a little keyring attached to the Touch Screen Pointer though, as can be seen in the first screenshot below. This is part of the customization options that you can contact Triforce about). I had problems getting the cord through the hole in my device, which is something that often happens in such situations I believe. So what I did is take a paperclip, fold one end open, and use it to peel the cord out of the hole on the other side of where I put it in. Don’t torture yourself if you can’t get the cord through the hole by simply pushing it through, take a paperclip and it will go much easier.

Usage

When using the Touch Screen Pointer with your device, you might want to try some ways to hold it. Out of nature I held it like on the image to the right, with the pointy end to the left of my thumb, just like you would hold a stylus. However, I found that it’s sometimes better to hold the point at a 90 degree angle compared to the screen, so that your thumb and index finger are above the place where the pointer touches the screen. This way, the pointer has the best effect on the screen while typing on a small keyboard, for example.

However, the “stylus-hold” might work for you, and it works for me as well in most cases - check the video of this Triforce staff member using the Touch Screen Pointer:

Anyway, no matter how you use it, it is important that you don’t press your fingers against each other too hard. If you apply too much pressure you will feel a strain in your fingers that really isn’t necessary. Just hold the Touch Screen Pointer between your fingers in a relaxed manner, and you’ll be fine.

The pointer feels both solid and flexible, so you can carry it with you without fearing for it to break. It has points at both visible sides so that you can use it no matter how you take it in your hand, and the points are rounded so that they don’t damage your device. There’s also a point hidden under the lanyard, which is great because it gives an extra solid feel. (Between your fingers you hold the two sides of the lanyard and the inner point of the pointer.)

A final note about the lanyard: it feels strong and secure, so apart from coming in fancy patterns it’s also created of quality material. When walking on the street with my hand through the lanyard (like I described above) I’ll feel safe when accidentaly dropping the device. The lanyard is easily strong enough to hold the weight of a falling device!

Conclusion

Product specifications accoring to Triforce:

• Specially adapted for touch screens with good fingertip control. For use instead of a stylus.
• The psychological resistance against the traditional stylus is removed using the Triforce Touch Screen Pointer, which gives touch screen devices a larger target group.
• It is steady in the hand and cannot be mislaid or lost.
• The pointer is always within reach and re-aligns to its correct position.
• The ergonomic design and performance allows comfortable use by hand, without having to exert excess pressure.
• Extremely durable – it won’t break.
• Frictionless and soft against the screen to prevent scratches.
• Triforce is safe to keep in your pocket – it won’t cause damage to clothing or person.
• Gives easy access to your device by pulling the strap, and also prevents you from dropping the device.
• Good for marketing use and as an effective promotional product.
• Can be designed to go with all types of devices, from strictly business to hip-hop.

I found the Touch Screen Pointer to be a very cool accessoire for my device, it’s probably the gadget-lover alternative for the flowers, bears, hearts and other shiny objects other people decorate their device with. The difference is that the Touch Screen Pointer actually has a use, since it makes taking out the stylus unnecessary. Since it’s not round but flat, and because you hold it very close to the end, it takes a little bit of getting used to but that’s not a bad thing. For the past few days I’ve been using the Touch Screen Pointer a lot while navigating on my device and I like it a lot. I’ve also found that I can use the lanyard to hold my device more securely, by taking the hand that I hold my device with through the lanyard before picking up my device. For nearly 7 Euros it’s priced at a pricepoint that’s very competing for this kind of phone accessoires (most of the shiny decorations are ~10 Euros where I live). And if you’re running a company, it might be a very attractive advertisement gift. Just contact Triforce about your color choices and the logo and I’m sure they’ll work out an order that fits to your wishes.

Product name: Touch Screen Pointer
By: Triforce
Price: 6,95 Euros + 2 Euros for worldwide shipping
Note: If you’re one of the first 500 to order a Touch Screen Pointer, you get one for free!

To be honest, GadgetMix.com is not a site I’ve been following in the past. There are many interesting PPC related blogs and websites out there, but everyone has his/her limit when it comes to the amount of RSS feeds you want to handle. However, I recently received a press release about a relaunch of GadgetMix.com and since a few sites have left my RSS reader in the past few weeks, I immediately added GadgetMix to the blogs I’m following. Here is the press release that I found in my inbox:

Welcome the all new GadgetMix.com, launches June 19, 2008!

On June 19, 2008, GadgetMix.com is re-launched after a whole month was spent on re-coding the whole website to bring to the users a refreshing, pleasant experience.

GadgetMix.com is all about gadgets; gadget news and expert reviews, views, rants about them. We cover topics of windows mobile, UMPCs, NetBooks, MIDs and anything related to technology.

At GadgetMix.com, we’ve a qualified team of computer engineers and other experienced bloggers, who all have the capability to explain, review and even rant about the news or any other software or hardware product in layman’s term.

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to the GadgetMix.com and enjoy the great array of giveaways they are giving to their visitors including free cases from PDAir.com and lot of free applications too!

So, head on over to GadgetMix.com or add the RSS feed to your RSS reader.

In the beginning of June, Resco released a new major update to their award winning Resco Explorer for Pocket PC, this time version 2008 (v. 7.00). Many people consider this the best commercial file explorer available for the Pocket PC, and therefore whenever a new update is released many people will want to know if they should update.

Updates are free within a year after purchase, if you’ve purchased Resco Explorer more than a year before you’re trying to upgrade, you’ll have to pay 50% of the full prize which is $29.95 (so the upgrade is close to $15). It’s a fairly pricey program, and that might make it attractive to get one of Resco’s suites here. That’s what I did: Resco Explorer, Photo Viewer and Keyboard Pro for $44.91. So you pay for the two cheapest programs and get the most expensive one for free. Or, in other words, pay for Resco Explorer Pro and get the other two for $15 instead of $45. The only disadvantage here is that after a year, you’ll need to upgrade the entire suite also if you want to continue to update only one program. (But perhaps the Resco team can help you here, I haven’t informed about this).

I’m now in the final weeks of my Law studies (if all goes well, that is), so in this review I will limit myself to only reviewing the new features of Resco Explorer 2008. I’m going to assume that you’re either familiar with the previous version(s), or you’ll let yourself get convinced by the fact that Resco Explorer won the Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine’s Best Software Awards every year from 2001 to last year.

During installation, I was surprised to see that Resco Explorer only requires 1,5 MB to install. That doesn’t include the FTP, registry and add-ins, but they are all smaller than 200 kb each as well. So I’m not sure how much space was required for the last version of Resco Explorer, but Resco does know how to put a lot of good stuff in a small package.

I’ll now move on to discuss the new features.

Touch control support

All items used to take only the vertical height that the font required. While this means that a you can fit many items on your screen, it also makes it hard to operate Resco Explorer with your finger. If I didn’t want to pull out my stylus, I usually swiped my finger to scroll through long lists, and then used the D-Pad to navigate to an item more precisely, and perform an action on it. That’s no longer necessary. With the new version you can use “touch optimized mode”, and to make it easier you are prompted if you want that optimization immediately when you start Resco Explorer 2008 for the first time. Touch Optimized mode includes more space for individual items, as well as a high toolbar. Of course you can also still view your items in lots of other modes, as can be seen in the other two screenshots below. (I’ve kept the toolbar large - more on the toolbar later).

Obviously, Touch mode also means that you can easily scroll by swiping your finger. If you disable the setting for this, swiping your finger across the screen will select all the items that you’ve swiped over. This way you can select items right away. With Touch Mode enabled, you won’t be able to select more than one file. This is because tap-and-hold would open the popup menu and if I moved my finger down before the popup menu was opened, I would scroll through the list. However, you can tap the second button from the right on the toolbar in the screenshots above, which will put a checkbox in front of every item. This way you can easily select multiple items just by tapping on them!

Side letter navigation bar

Lots of you will have seen videos of the iPhone where someone scrolls through the contacts, and uses the letter navigation bar at the side to quickly get to a contact starting with a specific letter. Now, Resco Explorer 2008 also allows you to do this (with your files of course, not with your contacts). The side letter navigation bar is optional so you can disable it if you want, but I can only see the positive sides of this. You can scroll with your finger, or with your stylus you can swipe across the right side of the screen and then select a letter. If you want, Resco Explorer can automatically hide the letter bar again after you’ve used it. But perhaps you want to keep it visible - that’s all possible!

File search filter

We all know the very basic search tools that are available with some programs. Enter the keyword you want to look for, and press “Search”. If you’re lucky you also get a “Search Next” button, but that’s about it. Resco wants to give you more power in the way you search for your items, and therefore make you find your items faster. You can use the “Not older than” option if you’re looking for a fairly recent item (even though the drop-down box allows you to look for Years as well). But if you know that you’re looking for an item that’s a bit older, you can enter the dates between when the item was created or last edited. The third item is pretty self-explanatory and allows you to filter the search results based on their file size. And finally, you can select to only look for - for example - system files or read-only files. Of course you can also turn it around: checking the “Attributes” button and then selecting all boxes except for the “ROM” checkbox, should give you all results but leave out files in ROM. There’s no option here to search for a filetype, but you can just search for .jpg in the search field if you only want to see .jpg images.

Virtual folder – quick access to documents, pictures, audio files…

Now here we have something new. Resco Explorer 2008 allows you to put a link to your Virtual Folders on the toolbar, and from there you can immediately access all your documents, images, encrypted files, etc. Now there’s not a lot to say about this apart from that it’s a very easy and quick way to find all the items of a certain kind on your device, so let’s just keep it with that. Sometimes short descriptions are better than lengthy examples. Besides, I use my iPod for videos and music, so there’s not a lot to show anyway.

However, what I can tell you, is that Resco is considering to improving this feature in a soon-to-be-released update. You should think in the direction of filtering the files you get to see. Perhaps you will be able to exclude folders like the \windows and \program files folder so that you don’t get to see application images when looking for photographs.

Customizable toolbar

Here we have another new feature that I like a lot. As you can see, I’ve started with a toolbar that includes an icon with two blue and a red ball, in front of a document. That icon opens a “Send to…” popup menu that allows you to send an item to your Favourites, the Start menu, attach it to an e-mail, send it with BlueTooth, and more. However, if you don’t use such functionality a lot, you can simply replace the button and change it to the Virtual Folder button for example. With Resco Explorer 2008, you can completely customize the toolbar by disabling en selecting the items you want to appear on it.

I thought that I found a small issue here, because I didn’t see any way to move the items up or down in the list. I didn’t see any easy control over the order of the items in the toolbar! However, after a quick e-mail to the developer I was told that you can move items by selecting them, holding your stylus on the screen, and then dragging them to the desired location. However, Resco understood the confusion this might cause by people who don’t try to drag, so they are considering to improve this. Perhaps they can simply include some up/down buttons at the right side of the screen.  

Large toolbar buttons optimized for touch mode

You’ve already seen the toolbar, so this shouldn’t be a surprise at this point. The toolbar can have large buttons so that you can easily select them with your thumb. You can, however, change a setting in order to return to the small toolbar buttons. This way, you can have twice as much icons on the toolbar, but you will probably need a stylus to press them. If you don’t need the toolbar at all you can disable it alltogether, but I don’t see myself ever doing this because there are far too many useful items in the toolbar that I use daily.

AES Zip encryption

AES encryption was already available for normal files, but now Resco has added a way to encrypt your files and folders directly when compressing them. Not only will this redure the space that your files/folders use on your device or storage card, it will also make it very hard to access them without having the password (which will be asked when you select the encryption and press the Add soft-key).

FTP module completely rebuilt, secure FTP added

Unfortunately, I can’t say anything about the FTP part of Resco Explorer 2008. I don’t use FTP: I’ve only downloaded something from the XDA-Developers FTP server two or three times, and that was from my laptop. So, FTP has no meaning for me on my PPC, which means that we should probably just move on.

Settings dialog reorganized

New features such as the Touch mode and customizable toolbar require additional settings to toggle. For this, Resco decided to reorganize the Settings a bit. I still find it a bit strange that Resco Explorer has General and Customize settings - I would prefer them combined by simply adding a few more tabs. However, that’s not the case, and you need to use the Customize settings apart from the General settings. I will show you two of the settings pages. (The Toolbar tab has already been displayed above, when discussing the customizable toolbar.) On the Skin tab, you can change the skin (color scheme), and - which is very nice - the action that is performed when the left soft-key is pressed. Do you want to go up one folder, open the action popup menu, or open it right away - it’s all possible. You can also change the font of the items in the program here.

On the other page you can see the Touch options. Enabling Touch Scrolling has the effects described above (you need to have the Multi-Select button on the toolbar in order to select several files at one time, but in turn you get easy finger scrolling). You can also enable the letter navigation scroller, and select if it should or shouldn’t be hidden after you’ve used it. You’re allowed to enable the tree view (folders on the left, items on the right - or a vertical split) and configure that Resco Explorer shouldn’t open items when you tap them once, but only when you tap them twice.

Added Details View mode

As you’ve seen above, Resco Explorer can display the contents of your folders in various ways. One of them is the Details view. This will give you large items for good thumb-selection, but also it will include quite some details about the files and folders you see. For example, let’s take a look at the cemai.vol item at the left. You see the name of the file, cemail, and the file extention: .vol. Then we can see the size, 1248kb and what properties the file has. A stands for Archive, and H for Hidden. Only because I’ve enabled the display of Hidden files, we can see this file - if you don’t need to see them you can hide them. Next, we see the date when the file was last used. And, obviously, the large icon to the left of all that information tells us about the file properties as well. I can easily recognize the “Homepage_spm.htm” file by the Internet icon in front of it, before I’ve analysed the file name to see that it says .htm at the end.

This View mode is a good combination of Touch features and displaying a lot of information about a file, which would otherwise only be possible by selecting the Report view. But that doesn’t have the large Touch items.

Favorites redesigned

A feature that I use a lot is Favorites. Some locations take a long time to travel to. For example, the folder with shortcuts in the startmenu require you to browse through the \Windows folder, which takes a while to load. Also, the \Windows\Appmgr\Install folder (where you can extract the cabfiles during .exe installation of software from the desktop) is a location I want to browse through quickly quite often. Of course there are also some other locations you might want to you travel to such as the My Documents folder, or a custom folder where you keep your documents, Today themes, bookmarks, etc.

The Favorites feature allows you to do this.
Adding a folder to your Favorites can be done just by picking Send to > Favorites from the popup menu when you tap-and-hold on a folder. Then, if you tap the large star in the toolbar, you get to your Favorites folder from where you can quickly go to that folder. You can of course remove your favorites and rename them if you want.

Oh, and if you don’t want the large star on your toolbar, there’s always the little star in the top right corner. Tapping it will open a popup menu from where you can also access your favorites, and edit them.

Quick search

If you are looking for a file in a large folder, but don’t want to go through the process of going to Search and setting up all kinds of extra filters, you can simply reduce the amount of visible items in a folder by pressing on the small looking glass icon at the top. You can then start typing, and the files in your folder will be hidden if they don’t match with the text that’s typed in the search box. Quite useful, and it certainly eliminates the need to browse through a long list of items in - for example - the \Windows folder! Simply pressing the letter ‘r’ after tapping the looking glass symbol will significantly reduce the amount of visible items and, in fact, show me many Resco-related items in the \Windows folder.

Significant speed increase in Registry module, Increased speed in loading folder items

Here, I can’t show you any screenshots to illustrate the improvements made by Resco. I can just tell you that the \Windows folder still doesn’t show up within, let’s say, two seconds, but I do see improvements in speed. The \Windows folder is, I think, the classic example of a large folder so if you want to test this for yourself, you know where to browse to: it’s right in the top-most folder of your device.
As for registry module speed, I can’t tell you any different. The HKCR registry folder is the one that takes the longest if you try to view its contents. And it still takes a few seconds to load, but again I have a feeling that the speed increased.

However, I wouldn’t worry about speed too much. I haven’t found any speed problems while using previous versions of Resco Explorer, and this one runs fine as well. The built-in file explorer doesn’t load the ‘heavy’ folders instantatious either. Of course, the motivation of the Resco team to increase the speed of the program is always good, and speed, efficiency and a small program footprint are goals that can (and should) always be part of software development.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are several new features, including the customizable toolbar and the Touch mode. We’ve also discussed some changes in the way the Options are organized and in how you can view your files inside the folders. Virtual folders have been added, and you’ve got a lot more power when searching for an item that’s hidden deep into some unknown subfolder on your device. The already market-leading Resco Explorer got even better and, among others, answers to todays demand for easy touch-navigation.

Wether or not the upgrade is worth it for you (if you’re no longer in the free upgrade timespan) is something I can’t decide. All I can say is that I enjoy using the Touch mode a lot, and that I’m looking forward to optimizing the way the toolbar looks. I’m glad Resco told me how to change the order of the buttons on the toolbar, since that was a real timesaver. Resco Explorer was one of the programs I used a lot without being able to comfortably control it without stylus. That, among other things, has been improved a lot. 

For new users, it should be clear that I haven’t shown all features of Resco Explorer. You can of course download the trial from Resco’s website and find out what you couldn’t figure out in this article. Trials can be downloaded as .exe or as .cab file, but if you work with .cab files you’ll need to install the registry, ftp and today screen elements seperately. If you use the .exe installer, you can just toggle the items you want to install during the installation process.

As said before, Resco Explorer 2008 (version 7.00) can be purchased for $29.95 and will include 1 year of free updates. After that, you’ll be charged 50% for an upgrade. And if you’re willing to give some more of your money to Resco, check out their software packages as well, in order to get [Keyboard Pro + Photo Viewer] or [Pocket Radio + Audio Recorder + Photo Viewer] for a discounted price. All purchase info can be found here.

People who have read more of my reviews may know that I also like to review older games which I’ve discovered on my journey over the internet. One of these games which can be considered as a classic, is Tower Mogul by PDAMill. When I searched for some top 3 or top 10 lists where people answered the question what their favourite game was, Tower Mogul popped up quite often. Most of these lists were, like Tower Mogul itself, not very recent, so I thought it would be good to take a look at this game and see how it can compete with games that are released today.

In short, we will find that this simulation game, in which you have to construct a tower, attract people (called “Virts”) to your tower, protect it from disasters such as bomb threats and fires, as well as ’simply’ balance the hotel units, offices, service units, shops and other available units, is still a very recommendable game this day with good graphics, efficient (menu) navigation and interesting, strategical gameplay.

By the way, in order to fill up the space to the left of the screenshot it may be good to mention that PDAMill has recently ported several of it’s games to the Windows Mobile Standard platform (SmartPhone devices without touch-screen). Tower Mogul is not one of these games, but there are many Gamebox games on the list as well as their new games Pachinko Go! and Glyphos.

Main menu

Upon starting the game you will see the main menu (like the image above). On the background you see what could become your tower, along with 4 items you can tap.

“new game” obviously starts a new game. You get to enter the name of your tower, which - I believe - is only used to identify your game when saving/loading. Then you need to select the difficulty you want to play. Beginner mode is recommended for first time players, and probably for second and third time players as well. When I started in Hardcore mode, I got a fire almost right away and because I wasn’t able to install a maintanance unit in my tower yet, the entire tower burnt down to the ground. I imagine that it takes a fair bit of experience to take such unexpected events into account while constructing your tower. The last mode, Sandbox mode, is only unlocked when you finish Hardcore mode with all 5 stars, and I believe that in Sandbox mode you can play with all units available to you right from the start.

In the main screen, “load game” brings you to a screen with one of four save slots. The tower name and ranking indentify your different savegames but it would be nice if the save date and time would also be displayed so that you can always see which savegame is the most recent since this is often the one you’d want to play. Obviously you’d most often want to overwrite the oldest savegame with the least progress, so it would be good to be able to identify savegames by save date. Below you can see the “load game” page along with the “save game” screen that is pretty similar, and which can be accessed from the Home bar in the game.

The next item is Options, and it will be discussed next. Obviously the last option in the Main menu lets you leave the game.

Options

Sometimes the Options section can only be discussed after explaining the game itself, but I think here it is OK to show the Options screen first. The settings come in three categories: Sound, Game and Other. The sound can be disabled, which I always do with every game, but you can also pick any of the four available soundtracks.

Game Controls allow you to enable or disable the grid in the game. The next setting can prevent your device from “going to sleep” (turning off the screen) when you don’t take any actions for a period of time. This way, you can leave the game running for some time as you earn some money and recover from building that beautiful (but oh so expensive) service for the Virts (people in your tower). The “Show Scroll Areas” setting gives you a small bar at each side of the playing field, which you can tap with the stylus to navigate over the screen and make different parts of your tower visible. Of course you can also navigate with the D-Pad and, if you have the small preview of the tower visible in the bottom right, by moving the selection window on that preview section.

Other options include two settings to improve gameplay for slower devices. I don’t think any of the recent devices should be considered a “slow device” taking into account that Tower Mogul has been around for a few years already. But if you do have the feeling your device doesn’t have the power for this game, disable the “Show special effects” and “Show Tower Virts” (or one of the two) settings to improve performance.
Finally, if you want, you can enable a battery meter which is of course always useful if you are in an environment where you can’t charge your device, so you set a rule for yourself to - for example - stop playing when you have approximately 30% battery left.

Okay, now that we have that behind us, we can get started in the game. So choose “new game”, or “load game” if you’ve saved a game before.

Tutorial

If you start playing Tower Mogul for the first time, you are presented a tutorial which introduces you to the first basic actions. You get to build your first lobby and you’re shown that these are required before you can build anything else (offices, hotel rooms, etc.) on top of them. After the tutorial, you’ll have to do everything on your own. There is a tutorial section available through the Home menu though, and it will show you four pages with helpful information. I think that it’s good for new players (and readers of this review who are not familiar with the genre) to read those instructions before playing/reading on.

The first page gives a general introduction, and the second page tells you about the game controls and status bar at the bottom. We will discuss those later as well, but basically the information is all in this Tutorial text.

The third page has an explanation on the buttons in the toolbar, and it is recommended to pay close attention to these. You need to be able to access the Builbar, minimap, statistics and unit info very quickly, so any seconds you spend on thinking “which button does what” is a waste of your time and - possibly - money.

The final page has some tips, but don’t expect any hints that provide you with a good strategy right away. I’ve read in the past that if you want a decent population quickly you should start by building offices since they attract Virts. However, you’ll also want to have hotels since Virts that rent a room will have other preferences than company employees, so they’ll use different services in your tower. PDAMill really wants the player to find out good strategies themselves, and I indeed think that that is the best way to learn how to master the game. If you run into any problems or need specific help on improving your Virt count for example, you can visit the PDAMill forums.

Tower rating: goals in the game

We’re getting more and more into the game. Let’s now discuss what you will have to do in Tower Mogul. The goal in this game is to build a tower that is as successfull as possible. This will most likely mean that your tower is high, wide, and attracts a lot of visitors (Virts). You’ll have to spend a lot of money to achieve that, but luckily any unit you build contributes to your “Total Money” in a direct or indirect way. It can be direct because Virts that sleep in your hotel room pay rent, just like people that have their office in your tower. But there are also toilet units, service elevators, security units etc., and while they don’t contribute to your bank account directly, they help keeping your Virts happy. And happy Virts means more Virts who are willing to pay more money in your tower, allowing you to build more new exciting units.

But not all units are available right away, you will have to unlock them step by step. Your tower has a rating, which is displayed in the bottom left corner. You start with a one-star tower and have to work your way up to achieving a five-star rating. To increase your rating, certain goals have to be met. Tapping the star rating displays your current goal, and be prepared to see the requirements increase in difficulty every time your tower rating is upgraded. The first goal is simply to reach a certain population (amount of Virts) but after meeting that requirement, you will also need to have certain services in your tower. Those services (a Security center and Maintenance Facility) are very fundamental to building a tower in which your Virts will feel safe and secure. They can be seen as ‘preparations’, and while such requirements can be considered too hard in the beginning of the game, they are required in a tower that is meant to be taken seriously.

However, both the security center and the maintenance facility aren’t cheap, so here it is important that you already have a good amount of offices and hotel rooms to get the money flow starting. You’ll probably even have to build more offices and hotel rooms first before you can start to think about saving for the security center and maintenance facility. Fortunately, achieving a two-star rating unlocks several new units that can be built. Using those units you can give your Virts a large offering of services and - for example - mix single person hotel rooms, twin hotel rooms, and deluxe hotel rooms. Be sure to always keep your floors connected through staircases and elevators though, since your Virts will become unhappy if they can’t easily reach their hotel room. Also, it is important to have service elevators for your service staff, so that they can reach all other floors from the floor where their service unit is located.

As you will probably understand, all things discussed above concern only a small amount of the strategical decision you’ll have to make in order to build a tower that remains profitable. After all, if your tower doesn’t bring in enough money at this moment, you won’t have the cash to improve it and make it more profitable for the future. Most often though, you can just watch your tower for some virtual days (time goes by quickly in the game) and see how the rent comes in and your “Total Money” amount increases. After waiting a while you’ll be able to expand your tower again, but you’ll always have to decide if you’re going to build a few offices or hotel rooms (which are relatively cheap) or keep saving for the more expensive units.

Navigation

When you get to the playing screen, you may think that there is quite some place that you can buil on right away. However, as you progress you will quickly find that you need more place to expand your tower. Therefore it is crucial that you can easily navigate across the screen. You can do this with the D-Pad buttons easily, and this is my navigation method of choice.

The two other ways use the stylus. In the Options you can enable the “Show Scroll Areas” setting, which will place the cursor crosses in the corners of the screen. Tapping on the outer edges of the screen will move the screen into that direction. See for example the white highlight at the bottom, which appears when I tap the stylus in that area. The other navigation method is with the minimap (the 6th button on the toolbar). If the minimap is enabled, you can simply drag the square around the minimap to change the currently visible part of the tower.

Home bar

In the toolbar at the bottom (which is introduced in the Tutorial section), there are 7 buttons. From top to bottom they are: Exit, New game, Load game, Save game, Options, Tutorial, and Credits. The credits are displayed below next to a screen with the Home bar opened. Also visible in this screen is the minimap, which shows the current tower in black. As you can see, there is plenty of room to expand the tower!

Build bar

The second button on the toolbar opens the Build bar. The arrows allow you to scroll through the available units that can be built. When your tower has a one-star rating, only the currently visible units are available. When a two-star rating is achieved, the amount of available units is doubled. However, there are also several units added to the items in the first row. You can get to these items using tap-and-hold on an item with an arrow. For example, doing tap-and-hold on the third icon (the Lobby, which needs to be on the ground as basis for your other units) allow you to build restrooms, and later parking spaces for under your tower.

In this buildbar, the first item allows you to destroy units you’ve built. Tap-and-hold on the item to change between “destroy units” (yellow) and “destroy transits” (red). You can also construct floors with the white construction unit here, but I’ve found than if you start placing a unit on a new floor, the floor is constructed automatically for you, so in most situations you don’t need to construct the floor yourself.
The second item in the buildbar allows you to place transits, but you can’t place them too close to each other. Also, only 6 elevators are allowed in an elevator shaft. So you’ll want to be careful placing your elevators strategically so that people can easily reach their rooms, offices, and stores. Also it is essential to have service elevators available in, for example, your Housekeeping units so that your service staff can actually get away from their units and reach other floors.

I’ll leave the other units for yourself to explore. Often similar units are grouped together, such as the hotel rooms (which are available when the Housekeeping unit it tapped-and-hold).

Statistics

I’ll skip the Pause, Play, Fast forward and minimap buttons because they are pretty self-explanatory, and the tutorial already has them covered. So then we get to the statistics. They come in three tabs, one for Advisers, one for Income, and one for Graphs.

The advisers give you tips which vary in usefulness. For example, the Mayor below tells you something that can also be seen on the Rating screen. However, the tip Gino Vinelli gives here is very important because it is the way I found out that fires need to be taken care of by maintenance Virts, and I don’t have to wait until I can build a fire department or something like that. So it pays off to go see your advisors once in a while. And hey, which Tower Mogul wouldn’t be interested in some FREE advice?

On the Income statement, you see your income and expenses listed nicely, but I haven’t used this too much. I don’t care about what I’ve spent in the past, I only want to know how much cash I have now, and how I can spend it best. So, let’s move on to the Graphs tab.

The Graphs tab has two views, which can be toggled by tapping the Population or Money checkbox. The graph that will appear shows you how your money has come in and went out in the past time, and of which Virts your population consists. In the screenshot below, I won’t focus on building offices for a while. Offices bring in Virts quickly, but for a well balanced tower (and better income later on) it is good to have residential virts and outsiders as well. (I’m not sure what Miscellanious Virts are). So to attract residential Virts I will build more hotel rooms, and for outsiders I will build a lot of the new units that come available when the two star rating is achieved. (So no need to focus on this too much when your tower has only one star, a bit later in the game you will have plenty of ways to attract outsider Virts!)

Unit Info tool

The next button lets you take a screenshot of your Tower, and places it in the Tower Mogul installation folder. The final button, the Unit Info tool, is a great help in managing your tower. As you can see in the first screenshot, it will give your units a color that represents their status. Green means good, yellow is average, and red means trouble. So anything that’s not green might need your attention! The elevator shafts always have yellow and red colors so you can disregard those. A smart way to use the Unit Info tool is to combine it with the minimap, which will conveniently show you the green and yellow (and possibly red) areas in your tower. The black areas correspond to service units, and since the happiness of your staff doesn’t have any role in Tower Mogul, they won’t get a green, yellow or red color.

With the Unit Info tool, you can also select any of your units to view it’s properties. For example, after you’ve built more elevators in a shaft, you can use this to reposition them, to make sure your Virts can easily move from one floor to another without traveling too much. Another example is the twin hotel room unit info, which allows you to change the rent. This way you can increase your income, but of course your Virts will be happier with lower prices. There’s a simple button that allows you to apply the rent to all similar rooms, but unfortunately this setting doesn’t apply to new units. So if you build a new twin hotel room after setting the rent for all rooms to 3500, the next one you build will be rented for 2500 again. Obviously, the comments section tells you what you can improve to increase the happiness of your Virt in that unit (the Unit Evaluation bar). Sometimes you will see a Virt complain, for example if a unit is not easily accessible.

Gameplay

So, how is actual gameplay like? I’d say that it’s pretty good. You start with a fair bit of money so you can build lobbies, service and normal elevators, offices and hotel rooms. This will get you started and get you some income. You will find that you need to save some money quite often to be able to expand your tower, but that’s nothing but realistic.

Also realistic is that your tower can be attacked by terrorists, power outages can occur, and fires can start somewhere in your tower. Obviously, such disasters need to be taken care of quickly. Fires will move on the the rooms next to it, and the floors above and beyond. So, unless you want to leave every other floor empty to prevent fire from expanding, you’ll need to have maintenance units. The service staff can then take care of your fire. (A tip which I read on the PDAMill forums: pauze the game, destroy the rooms around your fire to prevent it from expanding, and then let the maintenance staff do their work. This will limit your damages!) Obviously, in the screenshot here I didn’t do good at crisis management, so pretty much my entire tower burnt down. You’ll be left with units that can’t be used and need to be destroyed before new units can be constructed. So, don’t let this happen to you!

Navigation and menu structure is easy enough so that you can focus on actual gameplay, but you will sometimes have to search for a unit in the Build bar. By now I know that the Lobby, restrooms and parking units are the third item in the build bar, but I sometimes do have to look for the gift shop or minimart.

Tower Mogul includes a good amount of extras that help you during your mission, such as the minimap, advisers, stats, and a lot of information already present on the screen.

So, I think that Tower Mogul is an excellent game if you’re a fan of this genre. Obviously simulation games on the desktop pc are often more advanced, but this PPC game has - in my opinion - plenty of elements that need balancing and strategical decisionmaking. The buttons are large enough to use with the stylus, you can fast forward the game if you just want to wait untill money comes in for a little while, and vital information is placed on the screen efficiently and well visible.

The only thing I found annoying was that I can’t set the price of my hotels, offices, suites, etc. in advance. The “Apply rent to all twin rooms” setting discussed above only works for units that exist already, so every time after you’ve built one or more units you need to go into the Unit Info screen and set the price for all similar units again.

Product information

PDAMill Tower Mogul is available for $ 14.95, and a trial is available here as well.
The trial stops after reaching certain goals, and after purchasing the full version you will need to manually copy the savegames to the new installation folder. They are called “new1.tms” up to “new4.tms”, and you also need the “tm.ini” file from the Tower Mogul Trial folder. Just move them over to the new Storage Card/Program Files/Games/Tower Mogul/ folder. You’ll have to manually uninstall the trial.

Currently only WM devices with touch screen are supported, but PDAMill has recently been porting games to the non-touch-screen Windows Mobile operating system so perhaps this game will be supported on more platforms in the future as well.

For questions and tips, you can visit the PDAMill Tower Mogul forums (or e-mail them for Support issues).

Compatibility note: PDAMill has a notification on their website about version 1.5 of the game, that says:

We have recently received reports that many HTC Titan/MOGUL devices running Windows Mobile 6 may not run Tower Mogul correctly. If you own one of these devices, have purchased the game, and it is not running correctly, please email support and we will try to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

So do keep that in mind if you have such a device. I didn’t have any issues playing this game on my HTC TyTn II.

I can remember that Ilium Software turned 10 like it was last month.
However, it has already been a year since they celebrated that birthday.
So next week there is reason for a party again!

This is the key part of the e-mail Judie sent to me this afternoon:

We’re planning a week-long celebration, with a contest each day. We’ll be giving away Amazon gift cards, as well as copies of our software. The contests will be run on our blog, at http://blog.iliumsoft.com, from Monday, June 2nd, through Friday, June 6th.

And, since no anniversary party would be complete without a big sale, we’re having one of those too! For five days, we’ll be offering a 55% discount off the regular price of all of our software. The link to the anniversary sale page will be: http://www.iliumsoft.com/elevenyears (The page isn’t live yet but it will be there on Monday!)

So that’s a daily contest and discounts of more than 50%, for several days! Be aware that you need to be on the specific websites addresses to take advantage of these celebrations, but I´m guessing that Judie will put links to these sections on the IliumSoft.com homepage as well. Be sure to bookmark these pages already!

I’ve been putting my studies in first priority for the past months, which is the reason for the lack of substantial content on my blog. I’ve turned down several review oppertunities, but today Resco e-mailed me just when I decided to give myself a free afternoon, so I decided to take this chance to do some writing. Please note that this article should in no way be related with the Resco Keyboard Pro skinning contest in which I’m participating. I don’t get extra votes for writing this, or something like that. ;-)

Resco’s e-mail was about a beta version of their Resco Brain Games, which is an older game, but in a new package and with a new name. Resco has taken the games from Resco Brain Gain, designed a touch-friendly application, and placed the games inside that new framework.

Read on to find out more and view the screenshots! (Of course, you can click on the images to view them in full size)

When you open Resco Brain Games, you will see a list of the 36 included games. They come in three colors, representing the categories that were in the original Resco Brain Gain as well: calculation, memory and analysis), and are layed out in the familiar iPhone style. Easy to select, and you swipe your finger over the screen to scroll up and down the page. At the top is the X button to close the game, and at the bottom you can see the About screen and navigate to the Statistics.

After selecting one of the games, you will see another selection screen. There are two things you can select here: (1) you can change the game by moving the slider at the bottom to the left or right, or (2) you can select the difficulty level of the game you’ve chosen. The amount of difficulty levels can change for every game, and you need to complete one difficulty level to access the next. The amount of stars you get depends on the time you take to complete a level, and on the amount of correctly answered questions. So, answering all questions wrong and taking a long time to do this, won’t give you any stars and won’t unlock the next level.

As you can see, there are other items of interest as well. At the top right there is a Back button, next to the name and description of the game. There are also three buttons at the right of the screen, relating to your progress in that particular game. The first one shows a lock, and represents a trophy that is unlocked when all levels of that game have been unlocked. The next icon is awarded when you’ve progressed even more: not only do you need to have all difficulty levels unlocked, but you also need to score at least 3 stars for each of them. Finally, completing all difficulty levels with 5 stars gives you the ultimate “All complete” award.

Then we get to the games. You are free to figure all of them out when the update is released, or you can check the games in the currently available Resco Brain Game (with another layout though). I will just comment on the way the games are showed to you.

Just a bit more than 50% of the screen space is dedicated to show you the calculation or puzzle you have to find the answer to. Below that are the four keys that show you (parts of) the answer. In this example, you have to solve the puzzle 5+0 so the answer would be 5. You can now either tap the “5″ with your stylus or finger, or just press the right key on your D-Pad. So any way you’d like to enter your answer, Resco has got you covered!

At the top you can see the amount of total questions, and the amoung you’ve answered already. In the screenshot, the first out of 10 questions is being presented. In the center of the top bar you see the progress bar which changes depending on the amount of correctly answered questions. It will indicate the amount of stars you will get after completing the current series of questions. To the right are the question mark which let the blond lady pop up to explain the game. There is also the arrow that takes you back to the previous screen.

Here is the only section of the game where I would suggest a change to Resco. At the moment, opening the Help section inside a game ends the game. So after viewing the explanation of the game, you need to restart from the first puzzle.

If Resco would change this so that you can continue with your current series of questions after viewing the Help section, this immediately provides a way to pause the game. Often, interruptions come in at unconvenient times, and just ignoring your device to answer a question will result in a low-star ranking because of the long time it took you to answer the questions. Giving the Help section a Pause function would combine helpful functions.

[Edit June 6th: Resco has officially released Brain Games, and now the Question mark button pauses the game. So after you view the Help, you can continue with your current series of questions!]

Finally, the results you achieve in the game are grouped together nicely, as they are displayed in the Statistics section available from the beginning screen. You can see a combined overview of your progress, or you can pick one of the other tabs at the bottom. Then the results are split and displayed according to the categories in the game.

After taking this overview of the game, I think Resco has made a smart move. The menu navigation is very logic and the game only has a few sections to browse. From the beginning screen you can only go to the About or Statistics screen using the soft-keys, or go to the Game screen where you can select a difficulty level etc. Gameplay is incredibly straightforward because of the 3-way input method: stylus, finger and D-Pad. The games are not difficult, but it’s the speed that adds to the challenge of achieving 5-star ratings for every level of evert game.

My only comment on this beta version is that I would like to see a Pause function, and that the Help function doesn’t require you to restart your current series of questions. Both can be combined, as discussed above. We will see what Resco does with this comment for the final release, but even if they don’t make changes in this section, it is not a big problem. The games don’t take a long time and you won’t have to access Help often, so when you do need to restart a game, you’ve lost only a couple of seconds.[Edit June 6th: Resco has officially released Brain Games, and now the Question mark button pauses the game. So after you view the Help, you can continue with your current series of questions!]

Resco Brain Games will be a free upgrade to current owners of Resco Brain Gain, and is to be released after completing the beta testing process. Price is $19.95, or $29.93 in the Resco Brain Suite. Find purchase info here!

A month after announcing the Resco Keyboard Pro Skin Competition, it is now time to vote. Exactly 50 skins were submitted so it will be quite tough to become first place winner, and claiming the HTC Touch that is first prize.

That’s why I’d like to ask all my readers to vote for my Gesta skin (details here). It’s really easy. Just navigate to this page:
http://resco.net/competition/
and then look for the Gesta skin by spmwinkel.
The number of the skin (and the position on the page) will depend on how many votes my skin has, so hopefully it will be close to the top of your screen.

If enough people vote for the Gesta skin before the end of June, I will win a HTC Touch (or a software suite from Resco) so of course that would be a great way to go into the summer.

I would really appreciate your help! :)
Thanks!

I just got an e-mail from Doug Goldring over at My Today Screen, about their new project Shootouts. Often people see a review of one application and want to know about the competing software, but the reviews of that older application are older, written in a different style, etc. So what would be better than having one amazingly long review which covers all the important players in the field, and compares them?

Such a review is a very big task to complete, and that’s probably the reason that you don’t see a lot of them out there. However, MyTodayScreen just published their first Shootout, and I believe that there are more coming. The subject of the first shootout? Weather apps!

Here it is.  High Noon at the MTS Corral.  We’re standing at the crossroads in the center of town.  Ahead of us, the doors to the saloon swing open as our first competitor strides into the street…Fizz Weather.  The wind starts to blow gently, just enough for a tumbleweed to kick up some dust on the far side of town.  As the dust clears, we can see our second competitor striding up the road…Spb Weather.  The two stand at opposite ends of this crossroad, staring each other down, their hands gently resting on the six shooters hanging from their hips.  Then, a noise sounds behind us.  SBSH Pocket Weather has arrived, irons hanging loosely from his belt.  The game is afoot. We move quietly out of the way as these hardened competitors draw closer to one another. Three will enter this battle, but we already know only one will escape unscathed.  Let the Shootout begin.

Check out the Shootout here!

On April 19th I received an e-mail from BlogCatalog about their Bloggers Unite initiative. This initiative has been designed to

harness the power of the blogosphere to make the world a better place. By challenging bloggers to blog about a particular social cause on a single day, a single voice can be joined with thousands of others to help make a real positive difference; from raising awareness for cancer, to an effort to better education systems or support 3rd world countries.

That day, I immediately wrote this article, to be posted today on may 15th automatically, when bloggers all over the world write about Human Rights, their successes, and their violations.

I’m a law student and I’ve always been interested in human rights, so I think that this is an excellent initiative, and I gladly support it. I don’t pretend to know solutions to problems on the world, and I won’t say that my contribution will be worth a lot as far as it’s content is concerned. I just hope that even people who don’t keep reading after the break, will at least be activated and persuaded to think about the status of human rights a bit. That’s all I’m asking for. But, of course, feel free to keep reading, there’s more after the break.

On forums or blogs where people are talking about Pocket PC’s, when I see someone complain or argue about WM vs iPhone or something like that, I often think about the luxurious position we are in. So many people don’t have the money to provide their families with basic food supplies, water, and clothing. And here we are, reading blogs on our laptops and desktop pc’s, about gadgets that, when you think about it, are pretty much the highest form of luxury available. That’s something that a lot of people realize and, once in a while appreciate. But there are also things that we take for granted, like being able to write blogs or read them, and having free access to information and communication.

We, in the Western world, can just turn on the TV and watch the news, knowing that what we see is not dictated by our government. There is free press, and we have faith in that. We trust on the media to give us the true information that’s available, which allows us to form opinions about what happens in other parts of the world. At the moment, there are various issues that show that this is not the case everywhere. Luckily, our societies allow us to learn about those situations, so we can raise awareness and force our politicians to take action and try to improve the situation in other parts of the world.

An example I want to bring up is the situation in China. China doesn’t have the kind of censor-free press that we know and enjoy. I really have no clue how (and if) their media report on the situation regarding Tibet and the way China deals with it. I didn’t do a lot of research about this myself, so I don’t know too much about how the history of China and Tibet looks like. But what is relevant here, is that there is a conflict about the independance of Tibet - the people from Tibet claim that they should be an independant state, while China sayd that Tibet is one of their provences. Now that the Olympics in 2008 are organized by and in China, the people from Tibet take this oppertunity to raise their voice and make the entire world aware of their situation, for example by messing with the world tour of the Olympic flame. This way, we are confronted with the situation and it becomes a subject of discussion everywhere. Here in Europe, there is discussion about wether or not athletes should stay home, because going to China would imply support of their actions. The sporters, on the other hand, say that they’ve trained for years, and that they go to the Olympics to compete in their field of sports, not to be involved with politics. So they feel that boycotting the Olympics is not something for them to do. Now, the discussion has moved to the question if politicians (our prime minister, for example) should visit the opening and closing ceremony of the Olympics, or that they should stay away from it, showing their disapproval about the way the Chinese deal with human rights.

To read more about the status of Human Rights in China, you can visit the website of Amnesty International here: http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/asia-and-pacific/east-asia/china
Amnesty International speaks of:

stalled reform of detention without trial, repression of human rights defenders and internet censorship

and

Amnesty International has been able to confirm at least 470 executions by China – the highest overall figure. However, the organization has said that the true figure for China is undoubtedly much higher.

China, which the report refers to as the world’s top executioner, classifies the death penalty as a state secret. As the world and Olympic guests are left guessing, only the Chinese authorities know exactly how many people have been killed with state authorization.   

Personally, I am not in favour of the death penalty, and in the Netherlands it has been abolished years ago. In several countries around the world the death penalty can still be used as ultimate saction, but in a lot of those countries it has been practically abolished. Nonetheless, probably some of the readers here will still support the death penalty. (I’m not saying that I don’t think that murderers and rapists deserve to live, I just think that there is no way of punishing them and making them feel the same way their victims must have felt, without lowering ourselves to our level. Also there’s the problem about knowing with 100% certainty that someone is guilty, because the death penalty can’t be reversed.)
But no matter how you think about the death penalty, goverment should never have the right to kill people in secret, just because people disagree with goverment policy.

And that brings us to the most basic human right there is, the right to life. All other rights, like freedom of expression, freedom of religion, the right to privacy etc. are nowhere without the basic right to life.

With this article I’m not trying to push you to take action, you know that you can, and this is a decision everyone can make for themselves. There are plenty of websites and organizations that deal with human rights, or that fight discrimination, so they’re easy to find if you want to. I just ask you to think about the priviliged position we are in. The more people that are aware of the status of Human Rights, the higher the chances that it will become a political issue, and that our governments force other countries to improve the ways they take care of their inhabitants. I don’t expect a country to reform in 25 years, because it also took Western Europe hundreds of years to give women voting rights for example. But with constant pressure, we must do what we can to improve the standard of living as much as possible, for as many people around the world as we can reach.

If you’ve read this far, all the way to the end, I you to know that I sincerely appreciate the few minutes of time you dedicated to Human Rights. You’ve helped BlogCatalog making their Bloggers Unite initiative succesfull today.

Thank you.

P.S. After the recent earthquake in China, it’s good to see that the Chinese goverment seems to be open when it comes to sharing information about the disaster that has hit so many. Hopefully, the fact that disasters like this are too big to censor gives an opening to improvement in the future.